Friday, 15 November 2013

Baby-farming

As students we are taught about the Victorian age extensively
and our knowledge is then extended even more at university, if we decide to
continue exploring it. I, however, did not want to believe that the poverty and
the strict social rules, described in all Victorian novels, might actually lead
to such dismal conditions. Unable to imagine what Victorians were really capable
of, I went on to read Benjamin Waugh’s tract called “Baby-farming”, published
in 1890, and rediscovered the whole new “brisk business, known by the mild name
of “Baby-Farm” (Waugh 3).

A “memento
mori” of a baby, this aspect of the Victorian tradition when people took
pictures of their deceased loved-ones.

Reading the
ghastly description of a baby-farm he investigated, I was instantly reminded of
Elizabeth Gaskell’s account of the Victorians and their poverty in Mary Barton:

Crouching and sprawling on the floor, in their own
excrement were two of them. Two were tied in rickety chairs, one lay in rotten
bassinet. The stench of the room was so abominable that a grown man vomited on
opening the door of it. […] In bitter March, there was no fire. Two children
had a band of flannel round the loins; one had a small shawl on; the rest had
only thin, filthy, cotton frocks. All were yellow, fevered skin and bone. None
of them cried, they were too weak.” (Waugh 4)

[T]he smell was so foetid as almost to knock the two
men down. Quickly recovering themselves, as those inured to such things do,
they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three or
four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet brick floor, through which
the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up.” (Gaskell 60)

Another "memento mori"

The Reverend Benjamin Waugh was the Director of
the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) when his
tract was published in an attempt to direct the attention towards this way of money-profiting,
which degrades babies to mere sheep for slaughter (Waugh 12). In general, baby-farming referred to a certain
way in which a private individual, usually a middle-aged woman, acquired
infants to nurse and board for a fee, either a monthly or weekly charge, or
just a one-time fee. Thus acquired, infants were left neglected, starving and
cold, which led the quiet way to their untimely death.In some cases the farmers simply “disposed”
of the child without any mercy. Descriptions
such as the one in Waugh’s tract were common for baby-farmers. Their goal was
to use as little money as they could from the fee they required from the
mothers, to support the little luckless burden entrusted on them and the rest
of it was saved for the farmers’ own needs. Shamelessly, they were happy to
satisfy their alcoholic urges, rather than help a poor innocent soul not leave
this world so quickly. Appalled by what he discovered as reality, James
Greenwood asks after investigating a number of baby-farming cases: “And is
there no remedy for this? Would it not be possible, at least, to issue licences
to baby-keepers as they are at present issued to cow-keepers?” (Greenwood 38).

The potential
victims of the farmers were found through advertisements for “adoption” in
newspapers, where the farmers presented themselves as well-off childless wives,
or mothers with recently deceased children, but in all cases they claimed to
own a comfortable cottage for the infant’s needs. The advertisements were shaped
and written in such a way that was supposed to satisfy the possible
requirements of any unfortunate young mother. This certainly seemed like a
fairy tale solution to all Victorian young women with illegitimate babies, who
were the main respondents to the advertisements. Trapped in a horrible
encumbrance of that kind, a young working-class girl, who earns her bread in a
factory and has no chance of being with the infant’s father, has almost no other
choice. Using the illegitimate situations to their benefit, the baby-farmers
arranged secret meetings with the young mothers, most of the times sending mere
procurers, who looked trustworthy enough to take the baby along with the
negotiated money. The procurers were always convincing enough of their status.
They looked like loving mothers-to-be and cunningly showed great knowledge of
how to raise a baby, making the illegitimate mothers believe they were not just
mere messengers. The encounters were never in the alleged house of the
baby-farmers, they were organised most of the times in places such as railway
stations, because both parties required secrecy and a crowded place and no real
address reaffirmed that need (Greenwood 21-25). Thus, infanticide on a
large-scale was being done by “experienced masters in the craft”, who possessed
“the quiet canniness of the devil” during the Victorian era (Waugh 11).

An
advertisement for “adoption”, possibly by a baby-farmer

Imagining such a
place and its beyond cruel hosts made me think of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist instantly. Dickens uses the
actual term “baby-farming” and his description of it is very similar to Waugh’s
tract, even though it was published 52 years before the tract:

…Oliver should be “farmed”, or, in other words, that
he should be despatched to a branch-workhouse some three miles off, where
twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws, rolled about
the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much
clothing, under the parental superintendence of an elderly female, who received
the culprits at and for the consideration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small
head per week. (Dickens 4)

…at the very moment
when a child had contrived to exist upon the smallest possible portion of the
weakest possible food, it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out
of ten, either that it sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from
neglect, or got half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the
miserable little being was usually summoned into another world… (Dickens 4)

Oliver Twist asking for a second helping

Among the most
infamous infant murderesses was Margaret Waters. She was the first woman in
England to be sentenced to death for baby-farming and was hanged on 11th
October 1870 at the Horsemonger Lane Gaol. Waters was charged with five wilful
infant murders, neglect and conspiracy in Brixton, London at the Old Bailey
(the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales) and was convicted of the
murder of a baby called John Walter Cowen. Sarah Ellis, her sister, was also
convicted in the same case and sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment and
hard labour. The Times published the
news on 12th October 1870 (the
whole article) (Capital Punishment U.K.).

The execution of Margaret Waters on 11th October 1870

Margaret
Waters’ execution on The Manchester
Guardian 12.10.1870

The Victorian weekly magazine The Illustrated Police News, pictures
baby-farming at Brixton, where Margaret Waters was and the found dead corpses
of babies, allegedly the deeds of baby-farmers.

Another
notorious baby killer was Amelia Elizabeth Dyer, also known as ‘the Reading
Baby-farmer’. She was executed on 10th June 1896 at Newgate prison
for the murder of four-month-old baby Doris Marmon. Amelia Dyer was probably one
of the most prolific murderesses of her time. Before her arrest in April 1896,
she had been an on-going farmer for 15-20 years. Her “way of business” was to
strangle the infants with white tape the minute she brought them into the house
and then she abandoned the corpses in the Thames, in order to hide the
evidence. Mrs. Dyer’s unveiling started through one of her aliases, Mrs.
Thomas, when the corpse of 15-month-old Helena Fry was found in the river,
wrapped in brown paper with Mrs. Thomas’ address. Meanwhile, the mother Evelina
Marmon had given her illegitimate baby Doris Marmon up for adoption, to the
Reading Baby-farmer. Finally, after a police undercover operation, Amelia Dyer
was exposed and sentenced to death. She acknowledged her sins, filling five
notebooks with her confessions and tried twice to commit suicide whilst in
prison. It is believed that she might have killed as many as 400 babies
(Capital Punishment U.K.).

Amelia Elizabeth Dyer

“The Jews, or Mohammedans (I forget which), believe
that there is one little bone of our body, - one vertebrae, if I remember
rightly, - which will never decay and turn to dust […] this is the Seed of the
Soul. The most depraved have also their Seed of the Holiness that shall one day
overcome their evil.” (Gaskell
91)

This quote makes
me wonder, whether this “Seed of the Soul” existed in such people as Margaret
Waters or Amelia Dyer. Hopefully.

Works Cited
List:

Capital
Punishment U.K. – The resource site for the history of death penalty in Britain
– babyfarm accessed on 12.11.2013 14:45

1 comment:

This was really interesting. I liked how you explored 'baby-farming' in terms of literary text alongside real-life situations. This was quite shocking, but very informative. I learnt quite a bit from this.